June 9, 2005

MORTON BLOWS UP THE TRUTH:

The Cool War: a review of Satchmo Blows Up The World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War by Penny M. Von Eschen (Brian Morton, The Nation)

On August 1, 1956, the 84th Congress extended the terms of the President's Emergency Fund and ratified a pet project of the Eisenhower regime, the unrevealingly named Special International Program. A cold war dateline almost inevitably lends the words a sinister and clandestine aura. One can imagine the young CIA zealots who people Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost huddled in Berlin clubs or the crush bar at the opera, nursing steins of beer or glasses of sekt and making sophomoric puns about "SIP." The reality was both more innocent and odder, and clubs and concert halls were the appropriate setting.

In Satchmo Blows Up the World, Penny Von Eschen, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, describes a "can-do" bipartisan foreign policy culture in which postwar "policymakers exhibited extraordinary confidence in America's ability to shape the world in its image with whatever tools it had, be they covert operations, carpet bombing, or jazz musicians." The touch of bathos only underlines the ambiguity of American sponsorship of jazz as a propaganda instrument. Between 1956 and the late 1970s, the State Department dispatched jazz musicians to an array of Third World and Soviet bloc countries, including East Germany, Iraq and the Congo, visits that seemed to coincide with unnerving predictability with outbreaks of unrest or civil wars. The Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington tours of 1958 and 1963, respectively, found themselves in the middle of Iraqi coups, while saxophonist Phil Woods, on a pioneering tour with the Dizzy Gillespie band, arrived in Abadan, Iran, to the smell of crude oil and the sound of gunfire over the border in what had once been a troubled corner of the British Empire.

Jazz is an art of improvisation. Even so, it's surprising to learn just how ad hoc the State Department packages apparently were. Jazz tours to the Balkans and Middle East--it's worth remembering that Ellington's Far East Suite was really a "Near to Middle East Suite," as the peerless Johnny Hodges solo on "Isfahan" bears out--were part of a Truman Doctrine commitment to take over anti-Communist activities from the British and to support a cordon sanitaire, or "perimeter defense," against Communist encroachment on a line from Turkey to Pakistan. But while the itineraries were carefully planned--and the whiff of crude detected by Woods nicely suggests the considerations involved--the exact propaganda content was not.

In her introductory chapter, "Ike Gets Dizzy," Von Eschen points to the irony of the Southerner Dwight Eisenhower, probably the last overt segregationist to occupy the White House, putting his weight behind a man whose family was driven from Cheraw, South Carolina, to Philadelphia by poverty and fear of the lynch mob.

What the...? Though born in Texas, Ike was raised from infancy in Kansas, which isn't generally considered the South, and though not a crusader for desegregation was demonstrably not pro-segregation.
Posted by Orrin Judd at June 9, 2005 7:26 PM

State Department Jazz Goodwill tours have had the nice side benefit of creating some great music and leading to discovery of new talent. I recall an album called "Mission to Moscow" recorded in studio by the Benny Goodman big band after a State Dept. tour of the Soviet Union; for some reason, Benny isn't on the album and Phil Woods plays the clarinet parts. Also, I believe that Dizzy was on a State Dept. visit to Cuba when he first met Arturo Sandoval.